Ladies and Gentlemen, introducing the fabulous, amazing, thrill-a-minute, rock and roll Buddha’s, and the hardest charging band in the land - The Beers!

by Kurt Hernon

"We miss you John Boy!" a voice yowls two-thirds of the way through "In Memoriam", the opening-but-just-the-very-tip-tippy-top cut off of the Beers iceberg oeuvre The Beers Hotel. They miss Baby Jane too they’ll soon tell you. In fact, they miss everything – including truth itself ("I was lied to by God / where is the Lord?"). It’s a tough life we’re living and it isn’t helped along much by the disposable culture that fuels it these days. Even the so-called "alternative" is nothing more than Whopper to the mainstreams Big Mac; hollow calories for the bloated masses that like things to come at ‘em quick, easy, and neatly wrapped.

On The Beers Hotel the Beers apologize for all of this. They never wanted the alterna-rock nirvana to become something so disdainfully cold. They never expected that corporate mad scientists would take the volatile ingredients that had kept some sects of music vital and intriguing in the post punk era, even if it was the deepest of undergrounds, and distill them into formulaic urine specimens for the masses. You and I never imagined it this way either, but what have we done about it? All The Beers have done is cast the widest, weirdest, and most un-fucking-real mish-mash of a rockroll record in maybe the past five…ten…who knows how many years!

The Beers Hotel – that’s what they call it. It’s probably a little more reasonable (and humble) title than, say, The First Rock and Roll Masterpiece of the Next 1,000 Years, which of course, in most eyes and ears would be going overboard a bit, but going overboard is my thing – if I can’t advocate the sounds that set me off I might as well give up the ghost and go back to the bars.

Now, yes, I’d have to admit that this thing is obscure. So obscure in fact that it came to me on one of those burned disc’s with a white stick on CD label that makes the disc to fat to fit in yer average car stereo without getting completely fucking stuck in the thing (rendering one of the more functional critical listening spaces moot), and that sometimes makes the platter too heavy for your standard first-generation disc player. The packaging, a dehydration golden piss yellow jewel case and a Xeroxed and stapled together (yes stapled! Not a two sided print job, but two separate papers stapled together!) inlay booklet, is, um, amateur at best. It’s label free and sports the MP3.com imprint – so yeah, it’s wayyy obscure. However, regardless of what you may think, the obscurity factor is not why I adore this album the way I do any more or less than I would if it were the latest Columbia Records release (which, come to think of it, with all of the time and energy wasted at that silly label in getting that horribly dull new Leonard Cohen record out, The Beers certainly deserve a better shot than they’re getting).

So obscurity, with all of its implied hipness, doesn’t set the standard anymore – I’ve got a pile of discs at least a hundred deep to prove it to ya. What does make this disc the revelation that it is is its absolute and unequivocal sense of freedom. It’s free. Free to do whatever it wants, go where it wants to go, and do it anyway it wants to. And The Beers take freedom for a ride.

The Beers Hotel doesn’t pretend to be anything else at all and, in fact, it sounds like nothing else much at all. What sensible rock combo working for bread today would launch into a fluid, woozy doozy instrumental smack dab in the middle of a disc that is rolling along and knocking them down song after song? The Beers, that’s who. And "Dreams" is that song. Darned good one too. But that’s the idea here, these cats – there are apparently six of them – move all around the record, doing nothing hard and fast. The only rule seems to be the swing; the songs must sound like songs and have some sway to them. So Beers Hotel is not just noodling around noises, it’s not just pretentious wah-wah-ing, it isn’t a frat house prank band (ok, well, maybe it could be…), but rather this record is an explosion of styles, sounds, and substances. And like any good explosion everything on Beers Hotel is tattered, torn, shot sky-high, projected here, there, and everywhere. The weary jingle jangle of "Shades of Grey" spits on R.E.M.’s legacy that yields to the only thing it possibly could, the goon squad bounding on "Withheld Information", which, in turn trips itself up, hits the old noggin on the pavement and wakes up to sing a, gulp - is it really trad rock? - "Never Be Free".

Wait, wait, wait! It isn’t that simple. It’s almost inexplicable. And I’m not sure why I’m even trying! The only thing I’ve ever heard that was close to this strange, messy brilliance was mid 80’s hipsters Great Plains. They too were strange visionaries who never walked into a corner – ever, for fear of getting stuck there. Now The Beers share that same fear, a fear of life’s corners - because corners, as any good boxer knows, are where you go to die.

So The Beers, like a worthy contender, have learned to use the survivors’ defensive art of movement. Stay light on the feet. Don’t settle into a predictable groove. Keep moving. Move the head. Move the feet. Never stay in one spot too long. Go low. Go high. Mix it up. Keep them off balance.

I don’t know where The Beers are from, not that it matters, and I haven’t the slightest idea where they’ll go. But, to me, where they go does matter, because in an age where rockroll seriousness has reached unexpected and ridiculously staggering heights, when the idea of running counter to a mainstream culture has dwindled down to choosing between this big (clean cut, fresh scrubbed, young) dollar grabing crowd and that (tattooed, pierced, greasy haired, brooding) big dollar grabbing crowd, there has to be some slab of flotsam to grab hold of, there must be some off ramp from the rotten do-it-their-way fast life that leads us to a place where none of the rest dare explore. The Beers know it too. And while The Beers Hotel isn’t any sort of road map, and as it isn’t a soft piece of driftwood, it is a message. A message to you that, regardless the Consumerist giants that shape cradle-to-grave culture these days, it doesn’t have to be their way. You don’t have to follow; you don’t have to play their game. Just go to The Beers Hotel and leave the other world far, far behind (bet no one’s ever used that line before! Clever, huh?).

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